Wednesday, June 28, 2006

Desicritics Editors' Picks - June 12- June 18

Given the stark contrast in the way the candidates for the E-MBA and the regular MBA programme conducted themselves, I wonder whether we should make work experience mandatory. Else we will keep having fresh graduates, who have no clue about the entire management game, coming in for interviews and floundering their way through the two years of an MBA.

Perhaps Mr. Perry did not read the novel. Perhaps his researchers played a bit careless. Perhaps Time magazine fact-checkers had taken a mass leave. Or perhaps Mr. Perry confused Vikram Seth's novel with Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children - the only Booker of the Bookers prize winning novel whose protagonist Saleem (not Salim, please note Mr. Perry) Sinai was indeed born in the city of Bombay. To be more precise: In Dr. Narlikar's Nursing Home at the stroke of midnight on 15th August, 1947.

Again, the solution to this kind of block is individual, but I would suggest that one method is to try to shut your conscious mind off and just start writing. Don't worry about where it's going or what it is. Just write and try to recapture the feeling of reaching into the river and pulling out the words. I must have half a dozen ten to thirty page somethings--they may turn into novels or short stories, or they may just linger on my computer forever.

Writer's block is painful and even frightening, but if you understand what's causing it, you may have a better chance of overcoming it. It isn't mysterious or magical, it's not a sign that you're not a writer, it's not that your rhetoric machine has run out of words. It's simply that you're not letting your unconscious drive the process.

Radhika is a beautiful 5 years old child. It wouldn't be wrong to say that she is a 'miracle' girl who stands apart from most of the children her age. Immensely loved by her mother and grand-father, this innocent child, sadly has no school to go to and no friends to play with.

Her uniqueness is what has left her rejected from experiencing happiness that most kids her age take for granted. Radhika suffers from a rare condition called Polydactyly and because of it she has a total of 32 fingers/toes on her hands/legs instead of 20. Plus underdevelopment of her cleft palate (upper portion inside the mouth), has impaired her speech.

The second option is to treat it as a virus and apply anti-virus medicine on them. It is even more difficult as the international justice system cannot cater for footloose jehadi's (see the ridiculous legal steps that America had to take with the 9/11 lot). Furthermore it is extremely expensive in terms of human intelligence resources, time, dedication and the like. This last option also runs the risk of actually producing more jehadi's than it would stop. Think of the American efforts to go after Zawahri (second in command of Al Qaeda) by bombing a dinner party in Damadola village in the Bajaur Agency region of Pakistan on the border with Afghanistan. He escaped, but 18 people didn't. So it is highly likely that some others were prompted by this strike to become jehadi's themselves. So if you ask me, I would plump for the first with a judicious beady eye out for opportunities for the second.

A lot was written during the pre-World Cup buildup on how to handle your wife and/or girlfriend during this month. But I forgot to consider another force of nature that would conspire against me - The Parents. Thanks to the prime time telecast slot, Mom and Dad are forced to watch football with their Son. God forbid, sometimes they even try to take interest in the match.